War: What is it good for? (58 page)

At that point, however, the countries that had adopted the euro as their currency plunged into a debt crisis (or, more accurately, a balance-of-payments crisis between the highly productive North and the less productive South) and discovered the limits of a rules-based union. An old-style Leviathan could have used force to solve the problems, as Britain did when it sent gunboats to extract debt payments from Greece in 1850, but in the new Europe no German tanks would be rolling through the streets of Athens to restore fiscal discipline.

Relying on the invisible hand of the market rather than the invisible fist of military power to enforce its rules, the European Union seemed to be teetering on the brink of an abyss. In late 2011 the Swiss bank UBS worried publicly about a descent into violence. “Almost no modern fiat currency monetary unions,” their analysts observed, “have broken up without some form of authoritarian or military government, or civil war.” Sobering stuff, and yet as I write, in mid-2013, the much-criticized policy of masterly inactivity—doing just enough to keep indebted countries afloat, but no more—does seem to be averting disaster. Despite skyrocketing unemployment, violent street protests, and political crisis, Greece has hung on within the eurozone, and despite mounting pressure on Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and even France, none has collapsed. Far from breaking Europe apart, the crisis may yet become an opportunity to push political centralization further. Without shooting anyone, Europe's administrators might succeed where Napoleon and Hitler failed.

The Nobel Committee recognized this in 2012 by awarding its Peace Prize to the entire European Union. And well they might—the EU's citizens murder each other less often than any other people on earth; its governments have abolished the death penalty; and it has abandoned war within its borders and almost given it up beyond them too. Europeans outside the EU still sometimes see positive payoffs from force, as Russia showed in its Five-Day War against Georgia in 2008, but within the EU few seem to agree. The EU's Common Security and Defence Policy does recognize the right to use force, but only Britain and France have done so, and always to restore peace in collapsing former colonies. Even when there were clear
humanitarian arguments for military action, as in Kosovo in 1999, western European governments moved with a caution that often infuriated their American partners. The surreal face-off between Sweden and Belarus in 2012—when a Swedish plane parachuted eight hundred teddy bears onto Minsk, each clutching a little sign saying “Free Speech Now,” and Belarus counterattacked by firing the generals in charge of its border patrol and air force—might be more typical of the new European way of war.

In 2003, opinion pollsters found that only 12 percent of French and Germans thought that war was ever justified, as against 55 percent of Americans, and in 2006 respondents in Britain, France, and Spain even told pollsters that the warlike Americans were the greatest threat to world peace. “On major strategic and international questions today,” the strategist Robert Kagan concluded, “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.”

The growing contrast between European and American attitudes to violence has occasioned much comment, but there is no mystery about it. Europeans are from Venus
because
Americans are from Mars. Without the American globocop protecting the peace, Europe's dovish strategy would be impossible. But on the other hand, without European dovishness, the United States could not afford to go on as globocop. If the European Union had acted more hawkishly over the past fifteen years, the costs of countering it would already be undermining the American position, just as the costs of countering Germany undermined the British globocop a hundred years ago. Mars and Venus need each other.

Between 1945 and 1989, the best way for western Europe to play the game of death was by being warlike enough to help deter the Soviet Union but not so warlike as to alarm the Americans (disagreement over exactly where that sweet spot was partly explains France's departure from NATO's unified command structure in 1966). Since 1989, though, facing no serious security risks at all and being able to rely on the United States to punish any and all hawks, western Europe has become even more dovish (disagreement over which hawks needed punishment partly explains the spike in European anti-Americanism in 2003). The result: unlike British governments a century ago, American administrations have never had to worry that their money and protection were nourishing European rivals that would challenge their ability to act as a globocop.

Europe's move toward Venus has not, of course, abolished the tensions between the outer rim, the inner rim, and the heartland that Mackinder identified a century ago. Since the seventeenth century, British grand strategy
has revolved around engaging with the wider world while preventing any single power from dominating continental Europe. “We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual friends,” said Lord Palmerston, the foreign secretary, in 1848; only “our interests are eternal and perpetual.” Following this logic, he would have understood why Britain stayed out of the eurozone, will hold a referendum on European Union membership by 2017, and is sometimes markedly less Venusian than its neighbors.

Eastern Europeans also have doubts about Venus. Caught along the line separating the heartland from the inner rim, and lacking natural barriers to protect them from their mighty German and Russian neighbors, they too find that centuries-old strategic concerns have not gone away. Like Britain, several eastern European governments seek to balance their fears of a German-dominated European Union by leaning even more toward the American globocop. The paradox of power being what it is, however, the United States does not want its best friends leaning
too
far away from the European Union, because that would threaten the calm that America needs if it is to do its job.

Western Europe has not transcended the game of death. Rather, it has played the game skillfully, reaping the rewards offered to doves by the presence of a globocop that punishes hawks. Nor has the United States become a rogue nation; it too has played the game skillfully, reaping the rewards of European dovishness to maintain its position as globocop. The European Union richly deserved its 2012 Peace Prize, but when the Nobel Committee gave the 2009 prize to Barack Obama, it might have done better to award it to all American presidents since 1945. Collectively, they have made Europe's experiment possible.

America's Boer War

If western Europe is the region where the United States has done best at avoiding creating a rival, southwest Asia has some claims to be the one where it has done worst. The United States has fought three wars here (four if we count the 2012 air strikes on Libya) since the Berlin Wall came down, and will be lucky to get through the 2010s without fighting a fourth (or fifth). In this region, the similarities between the problems of the new and the old globocops are especially strong.

That is true even though southwest Asia's strategic significance has changed out of all recognition across the last hundred years. In Mackinder's time, the Ottoman and Persian Empires mattered most to the globocop
because they lay astride its communications through the Suez Canal to India (
Figure 7.4
). From the Caucasus to the Hindu Kush, British and Russian explorers and spies jostled for decades in what Kipling called “the Great Game.” Russian armies swallowed up what are now the -stans of central Asia; British redcoats swallowed, but could not keep down, Afghanistan.

What changed the Great Game into the version we now play was of course oil. For decades after the world's first well was sunk at Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, the United States remained the center of production, but drilling started in southwest Asia in 1871, and Russian pioneers soon struck black gold at Baku in Azerbaijan. Western oilmen followed, with a British speculator buying up rights to two-thirds of the oil in Persia in 1901 and Standard of California opening the first Saudi oil field in 1933. Production boomed in the 1960s to meet American, European, and Japanese demand, and by the mid-1970s oil was sucking more than $400 million of outside money to the shores of the Persian Gulf every day.

Western newspapers went wild with stories of Arab millionaires buying up historic landmarks, but on the face of it there was little danger that America's success in creating a free market for the oil it needed would also create a southwest Asian rival. With their tiny middle classes, restricted educational systems, and endemic corruption, not even the richest oil-producing
countries of the 1960s were in any position to have their own industrial revolutions or create diversified, modern economies.

Because of this, oil money did not empower broad citizenries, as American aid had in Europe after World War II. Instead, it flowed largely into the hands of narrow elites, whose repression, dishonesty, and incompetence provoked growing anger. The United States, anxious to keep the sources of its oil out of Soviet clutches, found itself propping up dictators, juntas, and absolutist kings; critics regularly charged that it was now running the same kind of informal empire that Europeans had used to dominate the Middle East in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Oil oligarchs tried to channel popular discontent into nationalism and hatred of Israel, but mullahs and ayatollahs did much better at hijacking the rage to serve Islamic fundamentalism (and, of course, hatred of Israel too). Few Islamists saw the United States as their primary enemy, and even during the Iranian hostage crisis some Americans still hoped to befriend the religious radicals (improbable as it now seems,
Time
magazine named Ayatollah Khomeini as its 1979 Man of the Year). But the revolutionaries quickly discovered that there was no way to fight American puppets without fighting America too, and before 1979 was over, Iran had branded the United States the Great Satan.

Unintended consequences abounded as the globocop tried to manage this angry new Islam. Far from the Persian Gulf's oil fields, American aid proved crucial to sustaining Afghan resistance against the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, but instead of earning goodwill, this just created a well-armed, battle-hardened legion of Arab jihadists. These men, ready to wage holy war against any foe, exploited the chaos left by the struggle against communism to turn Afghanistan into an Islamist safe haven.

Worse was to come. Back in the heart of oil country, the United States rushed troops to the Gulf in 1990 to protect Saudi wells after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Given that Saddam had spent the 1980s waging war on revolutionary Iran, brutally repressing Islamists inside Iraq, and trying to develop nuclear weapons, Washington's move ought to have won Arab hearts and minds; but the presence of unbelievers on Arabia's sacred soil instead made many Muslims suspect American motives even more.

The 1991 Gulf War and the tight sanctions that followed stopped Iraq from becoming the kind of southwest Asian rival that the drafters of the Defense Planning Guidance had feared. But over the next decade, American strategists (and almost everyone else) were blindsided by the way radical Islam mutated. All the forces shaking up the Muslim world—oil money,
opposition to Arab rulers, jihad in Afghanistan, outrage at Americans in Saudi Arabia, unending hostility toward Israel—came together in one man, Osama bin Laden. “Under your supervision,” he wrote in an open letter to Americans in 2002,

the governments of [Muslim] countries which act as your agents, attack us on a daily basis … You steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of your international influence and military threats. This theft is indeed the biggest theft ever witnessed by mankind in the history of the world … Your forces occupy our countries; you spread your military bases throughout them; you corrupt our lands, and you besiege our sanctities, to protect the security of the Jews.

By this point, bin Laden's organization, al-Qaeda, had declared war on the United States on behalf of all Muslims and killed three thousand Americans.

Since the late 1990s, al-Qaeda has presented the globocop with a new kind of rival. In most ways, it is much weaker than the nation-states that the drafters of the 1992 Guidance worried about. If al-Qaeda or an affiliate gets hold of a nuclear weapon, it could potentially kill a thousand times as many people as it murdered on September 11, but a nuclear-armed Iraq could have done—and, should it arise, a nuclear-armed Iran may yet do—much worse. Southwest Asian governments with tax revenues and plenty of space to hide their weapons can amass hundreds of warheads rather than one or two. They can build missiles able to deliver death as far away as Europe, should they so desire. Given a few more years and the right friends, nowhere on earth would be safe. Al-Qaeda, however, cannot do this, unless it finds a state sponsor, and it will never pose the kind of threat to the American globocop that Germany and the United States posed to the British globocop a century ago.